Time travel is a difficult subject. It also happens to be a very popular subject of many stories in books, television, movies, video games, and so on. But human kind's limited understanding of the workings of time and the possibility of time travel (especially the limited understanding of the casual book reader, movie viewer, or video game player) leads to depictions of this subject being wrought with logical inconsistencies, paradoxes, and plot holes.

One of the most common problems with time travel stories is the creation of paradoxes. Of these, some of the most common paradoxes are the "predestination paradox", the "bootstrap paradox", and the "grandfather paradox" (or the "reverse grandfather" paradox). You're probably familiar with all of these, but you may not know them by name, so I'll take a moment to define them for you:

This April has been a busy week for video games, and a very weird one, too. And the news has varied from good, to bad, to ugly, and everything in between. Here's some of the stuff that caught my attention:

I recently had the misfortune of needing to send my PS3 into Sony for servicing. Something was wrong with the graphics card and was creating very unpleasant graphical artifacts and texture issues on most of my games. EA Sports games such as Madden and NCAA were very badly affected. Fallout New Vegas would sometimes go completely black on me. Metal Gear Solid 4 saw some very irritating texture pop-ins and coloration issues. Even the Back to the Future downloadable game from the PSN was suffering from similar problems...

Sony's customer service is horrible. Not the service. Just the policies, the way that the hardware is configured, and the lack of respect that the whole process has for the consumer. I don't understand how they are still in business when repairing a $600 piece of hardware goes something like this:

"Thank you for calling Sony Customer Support. Oh, you're PS3 broke. Well that's too bad. Go ahead and back up your hard drive even though none of it can be restored onto a replacement system anyway. Pay us $130. And then send the system in. If we feel like fixing it, we will. But we probably won't, cuz that would require, like, you know, work. So we'll send you a replacement and inconvenience you even more by making it impossible for you to restore your save files and downloadable content. Thank you and have a nice day. Or a shitty day. Whatever."

Yesterday, 2K Greg (community manager for the 2K Civilization V forums) posted a topic previewing the changes being made in the next patch (supposedly due out by the end of April). In addition to a large list of changes, 2K Greg teased the Civ V community with this quote from Dennis Shirk (the producer of the game):

"The patch notes below are the first part of a large two-part update. We wanted to focus this part of the update on stability and bugs, and as you’ll see in the notes below, we’re progressing nicely. There is also continued work going into the AI, the modding framework, and WorldBuilder, and we expect to have this in your hands shortly.

The second part we have begun working on will be released in the coming months, and will include our next balance pass (for those areas of the game that were not included in the March 1 update), as well as continued work on AI, diplomacy, and a much-requested addition to the game that we’ll be discussing in more detail very soon.

You guys have all been instrumental in helping us to continue to make Civilization V better with each update, and there’s more to come!"

So what might this "much-requested addition" actually be?

There are 3 main possibilities:

Addition of the previously-promised pit-boss, hotseat, and pbem multiplayer modes

Addition of the previously-promised mod support for multiplayer games (currently, multiplayer games do not allow mods)

Addition of source C++ and AI code access to the modding SDK (hopefully along with some better documentation

More photos have been released from the set of the new Silent Hill Revelation 3D movie. These images were captured by professional photographer Sara Collaton using a long-exposure technique in order to avoid the use of a flash and maintain the dark tone. The pictures are all of an amusement park set. Lakeside Amusement Park was an important location in both the first and third Silent Hill games.

The photos themselves are quite neat, because the long-exposure method gives a sort of blurry flatness to all of the objects in the photograph, giving them an almost video game-like quality. Wait a minute... Did I just compliment somebody for making a photograph of real life look more like a video game? I think I just did!

But, what if you compare the above images with some screen captures from the third game:

A gamer's thoughts

Welcome to Mega Bears Fan's blog, and thanks for visiting! This blog is mostly dedicated to game reviews, strategies, and analysis of my favorite games. I also talk about my other interests, like football, science and technology, movies, and so on. Feel free to read more about the blog.

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